Some really worthless garbage


Robert Baratheon

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Mike, I had hoped the hyperlink I posted above the text would be sufficient to indicate the writing was not mine (I can't do quotes on this iPad). That was actually an excerpt from an introduction written by novelist Robert Anton Wilson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson

Thanks for the inadvertent compliment on my writing, however. :)

I'm pretty sure Mr Wilson meant no harm, so it is interesting to me how you interpreted it as pushing buttons to get people pissed. Just goes to show how Man's ideological territory (what he calls our "reality tunnels") is just as angrily defended as a dog defending his bowl of dog food.

What's even more interesting is that I posted it to provide another perspective on the downsides of belief in absolute personal autonomy -- the " bloody mindedness" that comes from assuming people are perfectly aware of the many factors at play influencing their behavior. This is a more compassionate view of humanity and speaks to why Sufism is more religion than philosophy.

But in one sense you are right. Personal growth - REAL growth - involves some degree of anguish. As Wilson goes on to observe:

"WARNING!

THREATS TO THE PRIMATE EGO

ARE COMING!

Unfortunately—while the Energized Meditation system is fun, and erotic, and makes you “smarter” (in the sense of more aware of detail and complexity), and even jolts you out of total mammalian reflex behavior into something approximating in slow but definite increments toward that mystic “free will” Christians claim you were given at birth, and I recommend it heartily—I must admit that there are pages coming up shortly in this book that will probably make you extremely uncomfortable.

Dr. Hyatt is a rude, insulting and deliberately annoying writer. He does not soothe or pacify the reader with the Christian and Democratic mythology of our society by pretending that we are all

free and rational people here. He insists on reminding us, every few pages, in the most blunt language possible, that most of us most of the time are conditioned chimpanzees in a cage.

Don’t let it worry you too much.

The situation is this: there are mechanical systems operating throughout the domesticated primate (human) organism, each on different levels. For instance, as Bucky Fuller liked to say, you never sit down and ask how many hairs you should sprout on your head and body in the next week: that is one of the thousands of biological programs that operate entirely on mechanical circuitry. Except in various systems of yoga, you do not have much control over your breathing, either: that is also an auto-pilot. The digestive-excretive circuits also operate with a minimum of conscious attention or strategy, except when you need to find a public toilet and the bars are all closed. (Make a list of ten more programs that keep you alive and functioning, over which you have never had any conscious control. Be one of the 13 readers out of a thousand who actually do it before reading on.)

The reason that mystics and certain other psychologists are always “attacking” the ego is that the ego is the one mechanical circuit that suffers chronically from the illusion that it is non-mechanical and “free.”

The ego and its delusions must be undermined—either attacked openly and bluntly, as in the Gurdjieff system and this book, or subverted more subtly and slowly, as in certain other systems—before any real progress can be made toward “liberation,” “enlightenment,” “finding IT,” discovering the “True Will” in Crowley’s sense, or whatever is your favorite term for becoming less robotic and more aware—less the computer and more the programmer of the computer—less the conditioned rat in the Behaviorist’s maze and more the Beyond-Human that the Sufic-Hermetic traditions and Neitzsche have predicted."

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I suppose everyone has the option of considering challenges to their world view as "empty of substance". The Internet is full of comfortable echo chambers.

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All of the points that have been raised here serve to demonstrate that the real war takes place within our own minds. And if you can prevail in the internal world... the external world graciously acquiesces to you. :smile:

Greg

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
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http://rawilson.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/undoing-yourself/

The blood-thirsty nature of Christianity and Democracy which is obvious, psychologically, if one listens even for a few minutes to a typical speech by Rev. Jerry Falwell or his good friend Ronald Reagan is, of course, based on arrogance, megalomania and a deeprooted sense of total moral superiority to all non-Christian and non-Democratic peoples.

It's a common mistake for leftists to assume that TV preachers like Falwell are spokespersons for Christianity, because their mindset is to groupthink collectively by race, gender and class. And so they naturally believe that others do the same thing that they do.

And it's a blessing that the Founding Fathers knew the evils of Democracy, and established The United States as a Republic.

Reagan is naturally detested by the left because he regarded their secular liberal socialist countries as the "Evil Empire".

The free will fantasy is not a minor error,

The fantasy of no free will is even worse...

...for you regard yourself as exempt from any moral accountability for your own actions. Just think what society would be like if everyone felt that they were not accountable for their own actions. Psychotics and schizophrenics believe that they have no free will and just do whatever the voices "command" them to do...

...an effing screwed up society.

The fool neither forgives nor forgets;

The half-enlightened forgive and forget;

The Sufi forgives but does not forget.

Those are beautiful and wise words which are akin to the Christian "...forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors"

By letting go of the resentments in the dark past, you free your own mind to live in the light of the present moment. :smile:

Greg

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The fantasy of no free will is even worse...

...for you regard yourself as exempt from any moral accountability for your own actions. Just think what society would be like if everyone felt that they were not accountable for their own actions. Psychotics and schizophrenics believe that they have no free will and just do whatever the voices "command" them to do...

...an effing screwed up society.

What's interesting is that Kacy is a staunch denier of free will, and yet we see him here tied in knots and vexed in a way not altogether different than a medieval monk worried about the salvation of his soul.

Otherwise, you're right. With no free will, with no God, morality is a minor issue at best -- the world is the way it is, shit happens and no one will care when you die.

Also Greg, you were describing in another thread the nature of the mind, and the Witness, and how most people's minds are a maelstrom of circulating thoughts, impulses, memories, feelings and daydreams. You suggested that only the Witness can free one from such bondage. I don't see what Wilson is saying as all that much different. It must be the Casteneda inflluence in you.

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Also Greg, you were describing in another thread the nature of the mind, and the Witness, and how most people's minds are a maelstrom of circulating thoughts, impulses, memories, feelings and daydreams. You suggested that only the Witness can free one from such bondage. I don't see what Wilson is saying as all that much different. It must be the Casteneda inflluence in you.

Carlos was a radical secular leftist sex and dope cult libertine who had absolutely nothing to do with that view, because he was totally immersed in narcissistic fantasy.

Greg

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Mike, I had hoped the hyperlink I posted above the text would be sufficient to indicate the writing was not mine (I can't do quotes on this iPad). That was actually an excerpt from an introduction written by novelist Robert Anton Wilson

SB,

Here's a suggestion. Try to come up with a phrase similar to the ones below:

--- The following is a quote from the link.

or

--- The following words are not mine, but xxxxxxxxxxx's instead.

There, I gave you two examples so you can brainstorm them. I am sure you have the talent to do something with this intellectual largesse.

That would help readers a lot since many skim material when it gets wordy (myself included).

... it is interesting to me how you interpreted it as pushing buttons to get people pissed.

I didn't mean for that particular excerpt to be interpreted as provocation. In my mind, I was saying the intention behind the writing actually was flippant or polemical qua polemical.

I probably should have said that clearly.

But coming from Wilson, a marginal novelist who wrote about far-out stuff (I'm almost tempted to call his work fantasy and science fiction), I can take his words as he says them.

Coming from you, I would find them (as I did when I thought they were yours) flippant if you said they were not. That's because I have a history of reading your posts and not reading Wilson except for some excerpts and skimming some articles about him.

Context matters.

Michael

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Greg, I'm curious what your opinion is of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

Jesusporn for immoral secular leftists.

Profaning the sacred always excites the degenerate.

Greg

Would you put "Last Temptation" and Serrano's "Piss Christ" in the same moral category?

Yes... as both belong to the secular political religion of leftism.

Greg

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